Singer and bandleader Cab Calloway was born in Rochester, New York, in 1907. He learned the art of scat singing before landing a regular gig at Harlem's famous Cotton Club. Following the enormous success of his song "Minnie the Moocher" (1931), Calloway became one of the most popular entertainers of the 1930s and '40s. He appeared on stage and in films before his death in 1994, at age 86, in Hockessin, Delaware.

Roberts, a diminutive woman with a large, unpretentious smile, owns her childhood home at 1219 Q St. NW. It is a brick, four-story corner house that has been converted into three apartments and into office space occupied by her estranged husband, Dr. Andrew Roberts.

The artist and a younger brother were brought up by their father, Dr. Jackson Davis, a dentist who had his office at the house for 20 years. Her father also taught dentistry at Howard, she said. "He worked at the Old Patent Office at Eighth and G streets NW as a guard at night while attending dental school," Roberts said. "He was a very well-known part of the Washington community and as a dentist did a lot for organized dentistry."

Betye Saar, née Betye Irene Brown, (born July 30, 1926, Los Angeles, Calif., U.S.), American artist and educator, renowned for her assemblages that lampoon racist attitudes about blacks and for installations featuring mystical themes.

Tracey Emin, CBE, RA (; born 3 July 1963) is an English artist known for her autobiographical and confessional artwork. Emin produces work in a variety of media including drawing, painting, sculpture, film, photography, neon text and sewn appliqué. Once the "enfant terrible" of the Young British Artists in the 1980s, Tracey Emin is now a Royal Academician of the Royal Academy of Arts.

Joan Mitchell was born in Chicago on February 12, 1925. After graduating from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1947, she was awarded a James Nelson Raymond Foreign Traveling Fellowship, which took her to France for a year in 1948–49, and it was there that her paintings moved toward abstraction. Returning to New York, she participated in the famous “9th Street Show” in 1951, and soon established a reputation as one of the leading younger American Abstract Expressionist painters. She exhibited regularly in New York throughout the next four decades and maintained close friendships with many New York School painters and poets.

Born and raised in the Bronx, New York, Rose Piper (1917-2005) studied at Hunter College, where she majored in art and minored in geometry. Post-1940 graduation, she began attending the Art Students League of New York from 1943-1946. During this time, poet Myron O’Higgins introduced her to Sterling Brown, who supported her growing love of blues music. In 1946, after receiving a Julius Rosenwald fellowship, Piper traveled through the American South studying blues music; her research inspiring a series of abstract, blues-themed paintings, often preferring to keep the human figure the center of her work.

As a girl, Thomas dreamed of being an architect and building bridges, but there were few women architects a century ago. Instead, she attended Howard University, becoming its first fine arts graduate in 1924. In 1924, Thomas began a 35 year career teaching art at a D.C. junior high school. She was devoted to her students and organized art clubs, lectures, and student exhibitions for them. Teaching allowed her to support herself while pursuing her own painting part-time.

Mickalene Thomas (American, b.1971) is a New York-based artist who is best known for her elaborate rhinestone-adorned paintings as well as her use of colorful acrylic paints. She is also known for her provocative paintings of African American women who romanticize power and femininity, which is reminiscent of the 1970s-style Blaxploitation genre. Her work explores and expands on the common definition of beauty in a Contemporary perspective. Her work is heavily influenced by pop culture as well as Pop Art. Thomas's work is also inspired by her serious study of art history, as well as the genres of landscape, still life, and portraiture. Thomas graduated from the Pratt Institute in 2000 with a BA in Fine Arts and earned her MA in Fine Arts at Yale University in 2002. She also studied abroad in Lismore, Australia, at Southern Cross University.